conclusions
main conclusion
Women in translation is well versed and forever applicable to society. This project is proof of concept on how women are percieved, not only through the eyes of the Grimms Brothers, but in the world today. The translation from English to German is immensely different in how it is written. There is much less dialogue than the English translation. The perceptions of positive, neutral, and negative conversations differ between characters from one story to the next. Some of these differences could be due to various ways of completing markup, but for example, the German version of Little Snow White seems to be simplified compared to the English version. There only seems to be one queen in the tale, but the English version includes a second. It is possible that the English versions may give additional background, but then clearly the translation is also an adapted version.
The types of women characters, generally, are as follows:
Birth mothers, who are generally loving towards there children.
Stepmothers, who tend to be loving towards there own children, but “evil” towards their stepchildren.
Witches, who tend to come across as nuturing towards young children, but do so to manipulate them.
Daughters, who tend to be caring and driven in their tasks.
Stepdaughters, who tend to be rude to the step siblings, spoiled, and lazy.
Overall, the mothers and daughters seem to be “good”, while the stepmothers, stepdaughters, and witches seem to be “evil”.
In terms of topic modeling, the team discovered that the main difference between the tales seems to be that characters are named differently, instead of any strong differences in themes or values. As such, we argue that the tales follow similar narratives, but with surface level modifications.
other considerations
This project is a creative way to continue our research and continue to develop our digital humanity skills. As a group, if we were to start this again and had much more time, we would have more carefully deciphered our XML markup. It is clear to us now that this markup rules our results. We would have read through the tales more delibrately and matched our references for characters and other elements, as well as broken up tasks to further focus our analysis on acts or dialogue. With the possible continuation of this project, it is possible for us to dive deeper into both the acts and dialogue.